My 2024 | A year full of disappointments for Vollering: ‘My body was full of stress’

2024 is coming to an end. Time to look back on an eventful year in our traditional end-of-year series. Today: cyclist Demi Vollering.

“Apparently I’m selfish,” Vollering laughs like a farmer with a toothache, laughing away her World Cup deception. In that one match, all the unrest of the whole year came out. “I wanted to win so bad that I was too afraid to lose.”

Because after a fantastic 2023, including victory in the Tour de France, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Strade Bianche, expectations were high for 2024. Especially because her great competitor Annemiek van Vleuten had retired. Yet she did not win all those competitions this year.

When the World Cup subsequently ended in a fiasco, the top rider was not spared. “Stupid, selfish driving”, “embarrassingly bad, Belgium can have you” and “they should never give you a racing bike again”, people responded on her Instagram page. Traditional media were also harsh.

Vollering disappeared from the radar for a while. “Fortunately, the people close to me don’t think I’m selfish,” she says months later.

“I was struggling with a lot of events before that World Cup,” Vollering admits. “My emotions sent me in the wrong direction. I am an emotional person, I make my choices based on emotion, and that often gives me a lot of good things. Not that day in Zurich.”

For Vollering, the World Cup is the final part of a year full of setbacks.

The first blow she will have to deal with this year will come in March. A few days before the Tour of Flanders. The season has barely started and SD Worx sports director Danny Stam has already announced that Vollering will leave his team after 2024.

“I wasn’t ready for that news at all,” says Vollering. “That caused a lot of stress in the first months of the season.”

“After the spring I calmed down a bit, but some insecurities lingered with me throughout the season. It was really no small matter to leave SD Worx. I enjoyed driving with that team for four years.”

After the surprising news, Vollering is getting back into her rhythm. She wins, among other things, the Vuelta, but her big peak moment has yet to come: the Olympic Games and the Tour de France in August. The road race at the Games unfolds in such a way that Vollering cannot play a significant role in the final, but in the Tour she participates at the front as expected.

She wins the time trial in Rotterdam and does not lose time unnecessarily anywhere in the first days. She enters the fifth stage with the yellow jersey around her shoulders. But that’s where things go wrong. In a quick turn to the left she falls and stays down for a long time.

Except for Mischa Bredewold, the other SD Worx riders continue. Teammate Blanka Vas wins the stage from the leading group and Lorena Wiebes also finishes ahead of Vollering, in the peloton. The leading lady alone limited the damage in the last kilometers.

With, as it turns out, a broken tailbone. She loses 1.53 minutes to Kasia Niewiadoma, but they don’t seem to worry about that within the team. It is thought that Demi will gain that time back in the mountains.

That doesn’t work. After a nerve-wracking game of seconds on Alpe d’Huez, Vollering is just four seconds short of the Tour victory. The yellow goes to Niewiadoma.

No one in the team knows about the injury that Vollering is suffering from. “I was in a lot of pain after the Tour and went to the hospital for pictures. That’s where we found out about the fracture.”

“It needed time to heal, but I didn’t have that time because I wanted to go to the World Cup. I had to avoid all impact and was not allowed to run, not do strength training and actually sprinting was also out of the question.”

Yet she is riding the Tour de Romandie in preparation for the World Cup. There she falls again. “That caused a lot of stress, because I absolutely couldn’t fall on my tailbone again. I had to find my way around it. What is actually possible? And how am I going to be good at the World Cup?”

Miraculously, she is extremely strong at the World Cup, which is held in her home country of Switzerland. “I was so happy that I was okay, but that completely blocked me mentally, I think.”

Achievement must win over itself, after all setbacks. She orders compatriots to chase other, advanced teammates and puts herself in the final checkmate by putting the faster Lotte Kopecky back into a promising position. After which the Belgian indeed walks away with the win.

“I used my strength and made a number of mistakes. I realized that immediately after the finish, but then you don’t do anything about it anymore. No matter how big the mistakes are, you learn from them. I will stick to that in the coming years .”

Next season Vollering will drive in French service for FDJ-Suez. Only a month after the World Cup did the team announce that the rider had signed, even though she had known about it for months. After the Tour de France she even started working with her new trainers.

“Sometime after the spring I knew that I wanted to ride there. After the first conversation, I walked out with a big smile and felt the fire in that team.”

The coming year will look a bit different than this year. “We mainly work with career goals and less with season goals. In concrete terms, this means that, like Tadej Pogacar and Mathieu van der Poel, I will compete in fewer races, but I will be in top form almost everywhere I start.”

“I find that exciting, but I am very curious about it. My main goals will in any case be the Ardennes classics and the Tour de France again.”

“Winning the Tour again is super important to me.”